The Complete Short Fiction

by Oscar Wilde, Ian Small (Editor)

Fairy tales, ghost stories, detective fiction and comedies of manners - the stories collected in this volume made Oscar Wilde's name as a writer of fiction, showing breathtaking dexterity in a wide range of literary styles. Victorian moral justice is comically inverted in 'Lord Arthur Savile's Crime' and 'The Canterville Ghost', and society's materialism comes under sharp, humorous criticism in 'The Model Millionaire', while 'The Happy Prince' and 'The Nightingale and the Rose' are hauntingly melancholic in their magical evocations of selfless love. These small masterpieces convey the brilliance of Wilde's vision, exploring complex moral issues through an elegant juxtaposition of wit and sentiment.

Genres: Classics, Short Stories, Fiction, Literature

ebook

Published February 27, 2003

About the author

Oscar Fingal O'Fflahertie Wills Wilde was an Irish poet and playwright. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of the most popular playwrights in London in the early 1890s. He is best remembered for his epigrams and plays, his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, and his criminal conviction for gross indecency for homosexual acts.
Wilde's parents were Anglo-Irish intellectuals in Dublin. In his youth, Wilde learned to speak fluent French and German. At university, he read Greats; he demonstrated himself to be an exceptional classicist, first at Trinity College Dublin, then at Magdalen College, Oxford. He became associated with the emerging philosophy of aestheticism, led by two of his tutors, Walter Pater and John Ruskin. After university, Wilde moved to London into fashionable cultural and social circles.
Wilde tried his hand at various literary activities: he wrote a play, published a book of poems, lectured in the United States and Canada on "The English Renaissance" in art and interior decoration, and then returned to London where he lectured on his American travels and wrote reviews for various periodicals. Known for his biting wit, flamboyant dress and glittering conversational skill, Wilde became one of the best-known personalities of his day. At the turn of the 1890s, he refined his ideas about the supremacy of art in a series of dialogues and essays, and incorporated themes of decadence, duplicity, and beauty into what would be his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). Wilde returned to drama, writing Salome (1891) in French while in Paris, but it was refused a licence for England due to an absolute prohibition on the portrayal of Biblical subjects on the English stage. Undiscouraged, Wilde produced four society comedies in the early 1890s, which made him one of the most successful playwrights of late-Victorian London.
At the height of his fame and success, while An Ideal Husband (1895) and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) were still being performed in London, Wilde issued a civil writ against John Sholto Douglas, the 9th Marquess of Queensberry for criminal libel. The Marquess was the father of Wilde's lover, Lord Alfred Douglas. The libel hearings unearthed evidence that caused Wilde to drop his charges and led to his own arrest and criminal prosecution for gross indecency with other males. The jury was unable to reach a verdict and so a retrial was ordered. In the second trial Wilde was convicted and sentenced to two years' hard labour, the maximum penalty, and was jailed from 1895 to 1897. During his last year in prison he wrote De Profundis (published posthumously in abridged form in 1905), a long letter that discusses his spiritual journey through his trials and is a dark counterpoint to his earlier philosophy of pleasure. On the day of his release, he caught the overnight steamer to France, never to return to Britain or Ireland. In France and Italy, he wrote his last work, The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898), a long poem commemorating the harsh rhythms of prison life.

Reviews

[Sepehr · Rating 4 out of 5]

اگه شما هم اسکار وایلد رو بیشتر به خاطر نمایشنامه‌هاش یا رمان تصویر دوریان گری میشناسین، پیشنهاد میدم حتما سراغ داستان کوتاه‌هاش برین و شگفت‌زده بشین.
تنوع سبکی و داستانی این آثار به قدری زیاد بودن که باورم نمیشه یه نفر نوشته باشه. داستان‌های پریان، قصه‌های اخلاقی و تعلیمی، ماجراهای ترسناک و داستان‌های کارآگاهی تنها تعدادی از محتوای این داستان کوتاه‌ها بودن. با اینکه همه داستان‌ها فوق‌العاده نیستن، اما تعدادیشون واقعا عالی و خوندنی بودن.
اسکار وایلد در این چند ماه گذشته به راحتی خودشو وارد لیست محبوب‌ترین نویسنده‌های من کرده.

[zofia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Zakochałam się w tych opowiadaniach, tak samo jak zakochałam się w "portrecie doriana graya".

[Michael Big Reader Berteska · Rating 5 out of 5]

Zamn! New Oscar Wilde stannie

[Luiz Felipe Iagalo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Top 4 contos:
- O Príncipe Feliz
- O Fantasma dos Canterville
- O Gigante Egoísta
- O Foguete Notável

[Joseph N]

Marked “READ” for most of it, read over the last 18 months or so.

Feels light when you’re reading it, but some of the fairy tales in particular linger with you long after.

[Jasmine Adams · Rating 4 out of 5]

i will forever love oscar’s writing and his love for personification.